The disturbing story behind 13-year-old Hania's accused killer

Saturday

FAIRMONT — The woman who says she is the godmother to Michael Ray McLellan became overcome with emotion when speaking about the young boy she once knew.

She is a sexual assault victim, she says, and she remembers praying that it would never happen to him. But it did, she said, when McLellan was a child.

"It's too late now. It happens to a lot of people. I got help," said the woman, who spoke on the condition that her name not be published. "It was just a bad situation."

Now her godson is accused of the kidnapping, rape and murder of 13-year-old Hania Aguilar.

"He's been having problems all his life," she said, standing just outside the door of an apartment as it rained on Fairmont. "He was a pretty happy kid. I never knew him to have problems when he was around me. His mother loved her children."

She said McLellan had anger issues all his life and "hung with the bad kids."

She hasn't seen him since 2007, before he entered prison for assault with a deadly weapon and first-degree burglary.

Regaining her composure, the godmother said she can't imagine what Hania's family is going through. She prays for them. She also thanks God that McLellan is now off the street before something possibly happened to someone else.

"He knew who God was because his stepfather had him in church," she said, her eyes wet and her face crumpled with emotion. "He knowed who God is. No telling how many other people he hurt. I don't know what was on his mind to do that."

•••

Over the last 12 years of his life, Michael Ray McLellan has spent more than nine years locked up.

His criminal record dates back to 2000, which would make him 16 at that point.

According to Robeson County court records, his first crime was a misdemeanor assault on a child under 12 in 2000. Over the last 18 years, he has been charged with 26 offenses, 10 of them pending from the Hania case.

Hania was kidnapped Nov. 5 outside her mobile home on the outskirts of Lumberton as she was preparing to go to school. Her body was found Nov. 27, after a desperate three-week led by the FBI. McLellan was charged with the murder on Dec. 8, the same day that the eighth grade student's funeral was held in the Lumberton High School gym.

"It has become a very big case," Robeson County District Attorney Johnson Britt said last week.

"Ultimately," Britt said, "this may have been a crime of opportunity. The unfortunate thing is it happened. A young teenager is dead. She did nothing more than what a lot of people have done in their lives. Gotta go to school. Gotta start the car. That simple act, her alone outside."

•••

Christine Faison, the aunt of McLellan's mother, lives close to his former residence on Marvin Street.

She said she only knew him and his sister when they were growing up. "They didn't hardly visit me," said Faison, who is 87. "I haven't seen Michael. I didn't recognize him when I saw him on TV."

"When he was little, he loved me to death. He called me Aunt Tine," she said, before removing her eyeglasses as the old television series "In the Heat of the Night" played in front of her. "I would tell him to stay out of trouble. He'd say, 'I will.' I guess it hurt everybody who heard what he done. You don't know what goes through someone's mind."

Faison said she was shocked to learn that McLellan had been accused of Hania's murder. But, she said, even in high school, he had been known to run around with the wrong crowd.

"Lord," she muttered, rolling up a tissue in her hands, "the boy just come home out of trouble. I don't know what he was thinking of. I know he weren't right in the head."

Since McLellan was last released from prison in June, Faison said, she had heard he lived briefly at several addresses, including briefly with his sister and an aunt in the Lumberton-Fairmont area.

Fairmont Police Chief Jon Edwards said McLellan never appeared to stay long in one place when he wasn't behind bars. A couple of relatives said he also lived for a time with his stepfather, Johnny Ray McEachern, on Wire Grass Road in Lumberton, not far from where Hania's body was found.

McLellan attended Fairmont High School through the 10th grade in 2002, according to the school system.

"Most of the people I talked to said they hadn't seen him in 10 years," the police chief said. "Most of them said they hadn't seen him since he was little."

He posted on his Facebook page that he was a landscape gardener. There is no listing for an employer.

Edwards said McLellan was working at Perdue Farms in Lumberton when he turned himself into Fairmont police on Nov. 13 for allegedly attempting to rob a woman at gunpoint. He was charged with possession of a firearm by a felon, second-degree kidnapping and attempted robbery with a dangerous weapon.

•••

Plenty of people in McLellan's hometown know who he is, but few are willing to talk about him.

That was the case with three men who came to the front porch of a duplex on Marvin Street, among McLellan's previous addresses. One asked for payment before he would talk to a reporter.

At the L&M Convenience Mart on the outskirts of Fairmont, another man who said he knew McLellan followed the lead of a woman with him. She shook her head as if to say "no" when the man was asked to share what he knew.

"Nah, I'm not going to do that," he said. "I'm just waiting on my food."

Some of the women working at the grill had told the owner that they remembered serving McLellan a time or two. He's heavily tattooed and appears to have a tear drop on his right cheekbone.

Marvin Street is a short road, with huge oaks lining one side of the roadway. Buildings that look like public housing share space with weathered mobile homes not far from the town hall and police station.

A woman at a unit of the Fairmont Housing Authority, where recoreds show McLellan's mother has lived, made it clear she did not want to be interviewed.

•••

McLellan was released from prison in June and was still under post-release supervision when Hania was killed. State records show he was convicted on felony breaking and entering and stealing a car in February and sentenced to serve nine to 20 months in prison. He was given credit for time served.

He was convicted in 2007 on assault with a deadly weapon and first-degree burglary. Records show McClellan was sentenced to prison for at least 10 years, up to 12 years and 9 months.

"We've done about as much to him in the cases we have as we could," said Britt, the district attorney.

But one case, which resurfaced in recent days, could have kept McLellan off the streets. His DNA existed in a federal database linking him to an unrelated rape in Robeson County on Oct. 20, 2016. Britt has said the Robeson County Sheriff's Office made a mistake by failing to conduct a follow-up investigation on the rape evidence collection kit.

On Wednesday, the Sheriff's Office announced that it had launched an investigation to find out why the evidence was overlooked.

"It leads to the question, could Hania's death have been avoided?" Britt said. "That answer? Yes, I think it could have been avoided. He would have been in jail, because he couldn’t make his bond."

Staff writer Michael Futch can be reached at mfutch@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3529.

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